Elision Ensemble - world-line (2019)

world-line presents the forces of ELISION on Huddersfield Contemporary Records for the fourth time, once again pushing the boundaries of instruments in search of visceral, expressive musical experiences. The three works present very different aesthetic approaches, crafting dynamic and innovative sound worlds from the ensemble’s instrumental resources.

Expanding out from the explosive grinding of lap steel and electronics to an intricate interplay between lap steel, trumpet, ?ugelhorn, percussion, and electronics, Richard Barrett’s world-line recombines its overlapping movements and sections, continually recontextualising the lap steel guitar against the wider ensemble. The results are riotous and unpredictable, sometimes producing delicate and ethereal tones, other times forming dense and jagged musical interactions, the performers discharging fragmented motifs that ricochet o? of one another.

Timothy McCormack’s subsidence utilises two performers on a single electric lap steel guitar. Capturing the feeling of ongoing collapse, the guitar’s strings are gradually loosened, constantly lowering the pitch until the instrument begins to groan in protest. Gradually, noise occupies the space opened by the mechanical failings of the instrument, transforming the clean, crisp sound of the lap steel into a distorted tangle of sound before being subsumed by silence and the distant echoes of the now fallen strings.

Finally, Liza Lim’s trumpet solo Roda – The Living Circle, performed here by its dedicatee Tristram Williams, references the energetic space within which the Afro-Brazilian martial arts practice known as capoeira is enacted. The capoeiristas spin and wheel in stylized combat: lyrical, celebratory, transcendent and joyous.